


Someone Great

by emjam



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Bittersweet, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Recall, alcohol appears but is not consumed, very early days of the recall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-02 23:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13328772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emjam/pseuds/emjam
Summary: "I am content with not knowing. I am content with a lot of things, now.”





	Someone Great

**Author's Note:**

> the title is an LCD Soundsystem song that, while about mourning, doesn't really fit the mood of this fic, but I was listening to it when I thought about this so I figured why not?
> 
> in this universe, Genji takes Hanzo with him when he answers the recall. Genji also never saw McCree again after he left Overwatch the first time, though he heard about him sometimes.

Ocean air wisps across the rocky edges of the Gibraltar watchpoint. Tall, once-modern structures weather salt and sea, standing desolate and expectant. Only a hopeful few have returned to disturb the buildings’ slumbering dust. 

Those few rest in their beds, waiting for the new day, just as expectant as the halls that they inhabit. They, like the sad buildings, will welcome with open arms any respondents to the call; the question is which old friends will return, if any. Rejected communication links and obsolete phone numbers make it hard to rebuild. Some have been swept to far corners of the world, some scattered to unthinkable places, some in hiding. 

Some are merely gone.

One of the respondents from the original Overwatch organization stalks silently out of the base. He doesn’t look like he used to, or act like he used to. He is a different man from when he was a young and angry Blackwatch agent. 

He leaps across the rocks and soil while stars burn overhead, and stops at a small protrusion of stones, a mound leaping out of the dirt just a shade too perfect to be natural. The pile only marks a memory - they couldn’t retrieve the body. A message ages somewhere in the databanks of Winston’s communications, one that thoroughly reports the agent’s death, final and absolute. 

Zenyatta says softly to him one day that he can detect the agent’s presence in the Iris. Genji is sad that he himself cannot yet feel the Iris like he can feel his sword beneath his fingers.

He sits down cross-legged on the dense earth with a palm-sized bottle of whiskey that he can’t drink. It becomes the makeshift tomb’s friend, clinking against the rocks when it is gently set down next to them.

“Yo, Jesse,” Genji begins as if their amity is not old and permanently severed. He waits as if a soul without a body can respond. The fallen deserve at least that much.

He can imagine his friend taking the bottle with a smile, and that alone is worth offering a material object to the dead.

The winds at this base once whipped his damaged skin. Now he is covered completely with plates and wires that hide his remaining humanity and shed the elements. Oddly, it is not as upsetting as it would have been back when he was first stationed here. He must remember to feel grateful despite what he has lost.

“I have some news that I feel you would find amusing.” He traces the skeletons of vapid doodles in the dust with one pristine finger, producing half-circles and ghosts of forgotten kanji. “Hanzo has come with me in response to the recall.”

The mound sits unchanging and impassive, a paper whiskey label smiling out at Genji. The sun decides to color the very beginning of the sky with a peek of lightness.

He laughs to himself. “Not what you were expecting, was it? I only spoke of him when I told you how much I wanted to kill him. That is not the case anymore. It is difficult to talk to him… but not impossible. We are rebuilding.”

The dusty patterns in the dirt cease. “You know, some of them are still looking for your killer. Mostly Winston, but Lena is concerned too. They suspect it was revenge. I suppose it is not a surprise; you did a job you thought was right, and someone simply was not happy about that. Well, whatever it was, I am content with not knowing. I am content with a lot of things, now.”

He knows it is not smart to dwell on something that didn’t happen, but he still wishes that he could have met Jesse as he is now. Maybe his face would look a little less guilty, his eyes a little less pained by his history. Maybe he would have finally moved on from what he did in Deadlock. Maybe not.

Genji himself used to be full of a deep, simmering rage, dispatching members of his family’s clan until there was nothing left to transfer his anger to. He once imagined putting his sword through his brother’s torso in gruesome detail. Now, when he goes inside he will hold out a mug of tea to Hanzo, who will take it after a moment’s hesitation without looking him in the eye. It’s a shame Jesse will never see that.

“I hope you are resting well,” he says. He opens the alcohol and pours out the liquid so that the ground drinks it up, and then rises with empty bottle in hand. The sun has begun to chase away the stars in earnest. He smiles at the dawn under his armor, and turns his back to it. When he gets back to their sleeping quarters the bottle will be disposed of, and he will ask his friends if they slept well.

He slips out of sight of the ocean once more.


End file.
